Out of control (2 page)

“I think we’d better wait a bit. When he’s had a chance to absorb his medicine and be lucid we’ll find out,” I replied.

Oliver wandered in from outside and we exchanged greetings. He looked enquiringly at his wife who had the kind of look on her face that you tend to walk round. I jerked my head towards the sitting room. He drifted over, looked in, came back and said ”Don’t think I’d wake that one up for a while” and disappeared out the back door again. Pragmatic chap, my brother-in-law.

But Heather was having none of it. “Well, I’m going to wake him up. I’m not having your grandson coming round here straight from a night in the cells and plonking himself down in my living room without an explanation.”

She rinsed out her coffee cup and, with a “Come on, Bob”, she marched through to confront the poor lad.

Liam stirred, opened his eyes and looked at us nervously. He looked a wreck. This wasn’t the bronzed, healthy looking, cheerful young lad I’d met off the plane at Edinburgh a few months ago.

His hands went up to his face and he rubbed it cautiously, presumably to bring him back to the present. His eyes were red and, after a night in the police station, his clothes were dishevelled. He looked around the room for a moment or two, his eyes avoiding ours and then, with a determined shrug, he decided to face the music and looked directly across at us.

“I’m sorry,” he said in a cracked voice.”Thank you, Uncle Bob, (I refused to let anyone call me Grandad) for coming to get me. I’m really sorry……”

“Don’t worry about that. Apologies accepted. What in the hell has happened? I got a phone call yesterday from the Accommodation Office on the campus telling me that you were being chucked out of the residence because you’d been fired from your job and so you couldn’t keep the room any longer. The lady asked me to come through and collect your belongings. Is that right?”

“I didn’t know about the room but, yes, I’ve been fired.”

Heather broke in.”But what for? I thought things were going well?”

“They were but I did something stupid – totally inadvertently, completely by accident – which has probably cost the company a fortune and Helen Mackie blew up and fired me on the spot.”

He looked utterly miserable. I couldn’t for the life of me imagine what he could have done.

“What did you do?”

“Can I please get a drink of water?

“Sure.”

He got up and went through to the kitchen, coming back a minute later with a large glass which he proceeded to empty in a couple of seconds, sat down again and proceeded to explain.

“I don’t know if you know or not but the company has been working on a project to try to find a cure, or at least an improved treatment, for Alzheimer’s. I’ve been working with Richard Easton, Helen Mackie’s partner, on the project. We were getting nowhere. Without going into the scientific details we were trying to find a way of combining two molecules in such a way that they would act together at the right place and at the right time and so be more effective.

“Well, about two months ago, by a sheer fluke, I found the answer. I can’t really take any credit for it because it was completely and utterly accidental. Nobody in their right mind would have gone in that direction to find the answer to our problem.”

I 
nodded, remembering the various stories I had read of amazing scientific discoveries being made purely by accident in the early days of science. No reason why it shouldn’t still happen today.

“Richard couldn’t at first believe it but we did various tests over the next few days, all of which were successful. As you can imagine I was over the moon. I had discovered – even although it was purely accidental - the solution to a potential major breakthrough in medical science. So I went out to celebrate.”

“I’d become fairly friendly with a guy called Rémy, a Frenchman, who always lunched at the same café in the Atrium as I do. He happened to be in the bar that night with his girlfriend and I was so pleased with myself that I drank a bit much. Rémy wondered why I was obviously so cheerful and I told him.“

“You gave away a scientific secret?”

He looked up at the ceiling in despair. “It seems so – but I would never have dreamt that I had.”

“How do you mean?” asked Heather. She had done a degree in veterinary science so she knew a little about this kind of stuff. I knew nothing.

“Look, I know perfectly well that one has to be careful about scientific research because it’s a very competitive industry and there’s a lot of money involved in a breakthrough drug. The scientific community does talk to each other – to a degree. They want to know what the competition is doing and they try to pick up info at conferences and all the rest of it. Also scientists love to publish papers and see their names in scientific journals. So there is an awful lot of public information out there but you still have to be very careful about what you say.

“I’m fully aware of that. And I’ve always been careful. This guy Rémy had, as far as I was aware, nothing to do with the pharmaceutical industry and, sure, I had talked to him generally about what we were working on but nothing that wasn’t public knowledge. Bioscope’s publicity material is full of it - explaining what we are trying to do. The whole industry knew – and we knew which other companies were working on the same problem.

“When he asked me why I was so chirpy I pointed to one of the lights in the ceiling above the bar and said ‘Rémy, see that light up there? That’s ultra-violet and that’s what’s going to get me a fat bonus at the end of my stint here in Stirling. The boss just told me today.’ That’s all I said.”

Heather and I both looked puzzled.

“That doesn’t exactly seem to me to be a state secret,” I said.

“That’s what I mean,” replied Liam. “How could I possibly have imagined I had said anything wrong? That’s all I said. I ordered a bottle of champagne to celebrate and the three of us polished it off.”

“Judging from what has happened there must have been some consequences from this, I presume?”

Liam got up and paced nervously up and down the room a couple of times. Heather seemed to want to say something and I motioned her to keep quiet. He looked out of the window for a second, ran his hand angrily through his hair and turned to face us.

“I accidentally left one of our samples exposed to ultraviolet light overnight and, in the morning, discovered that the fusion of the molecules we were working on had taken place while we’d been asleep. It was the result that Helen and Richard had been looking for for the last two years. It sounds crazy but we carried out all sorts of test over the next few weeks and were able to confirm something pretty radical. It worked. So Bioscope was getting ready to apply for a patent for what is a revolutionary drug treatment for Alzheimer’s – probably worth millions.”

He paused.

“We were going to submit our file in a few weeks when, out of the blue, LyonPharma, a big international pharmaceutical company in France, announced that they had just lodged a patent application for a new drug which would be a major breakthrough in the treatment of Alzheimers. Their CEO had held a press conference and, when he was questioned by journalists he explained that they had succeeded in fusing together the same two molecules and he mentioned the use of ultra-violet light.”

“So they discovered the same thing themselves and beat you to it?” said Heather. “It happens.”

“No way.” Liam was adamant. “The chances of anyone looking in that direction are millions to one – right off the scale.”

“They might have had the same accident.” It seemed to me that it was a possibility.

I looked across at Heather. She shrugged her shoulders as if to say she had no idea.

There was a minute’s silence and then Liam followed on.

“When Helen Mackie heard the news she exploded. She couldn’t believe it. She knows the guys at LyonPharma and just wouldn’t believe it possible that they had found the solution on their own. She was adamant that they had somehow got the information from us and she accused me of passing it to them. She hadn’t leaked it and neither had Richard. The premises hadn’t been broken into. That left me as the only possible source. She was livid, which I could understand, because she’d invested money and time over at least two years and just seen it all go up in smoke.”

“I presume this patent, if it’s granted, would be worth a bit of money?” I asked.

“Millions of dollars. Who knows how many? – possibly tens of millions. I tried to explain to Helen what had happened. She didn’t want to know. She said that if she could have pressed criminal charges she would have but there was no way she could do that. She wouldn’t listen to anything I had to say. She just told me to clear out immediately. I couldn’t do anything else. That was the day before yesterday.”

“So how did you end up in the police cell?” asked Heather.

“To be honest it’s a bit hazy,” he replied. “When I left the offices I wandered over the road to the Wallace monument just to get off the campus. I was gutted - and angry. I sat on a wall outside and thought about things. It had all blown up that morning. Helen had been so mad and things had happened so quickly that I hadn’t had the chance to think.

“Could LyonPharma have made the same fluke discovery as me? I just didn’t see it as being possible. I’ve never been in touch with anyone at there in my life. Then I remembered about mentioning the ultra-violet light when Rémy had asked me why I was celebrating. If that had been the inadvertent source of the leak, it could only have been Rémy – and he’s French, by the way – who passed the information to them. The more I thought about it the more convinced I became and the angrier I got. I decided to go and find the little shit and knock the truth out of him.”

“So you went looking for him? What did he have to say?” asked Heather naïvely. I thought I knew what was coming.

“He had nothing to say because I couldn’t find him. I went straight over to the place where we usually have lunch and he wasn’t around. I asked the guy behind the counter – Will – if he’d seen him. He told me that the last time he’d seen him was a few days ago. He had stopped for lunch. He apparently had a large suitcase with him and he had told Will that he was leaving. Didn’t say where to. Disappeared off the face of the earth. More than anything that convinced me. He must have been the one who fed the information back to LyonPharma. I still can’t see any other explanation. I had been set up.”

“So you drowned your sorrows?”

“You bet I did. I went into town and drank myself stupid. I woke up in the police cell. Thank God they were understanding. They thought it was a bit of a joke. This whole business is going to look great on my CV,” he finished bitterly.

He had sat down again and was leaning back in the chair, his eyes closed. I looked across at Heather.

“Coffee for three?” she proposed.

“Or the hair of the dog?”

“Oh, no,” came a groan from the chair.

While Heather went off I sat quietly reflecting. No real harm had come to Liam. He’d been indiscreet but not much more. He’d get over it. How could he have known? Nineteen was too early to start regarding everyone you meet with suspicion. Time enough for that later. But the effect on Helen Mackie must have been catastrophic. Her reaction was understandable.

But there was no doubt that, if what he suspected had happened, this was a blatant case of theft – and my family had been inadvertently involved. That I didn’t like one bit.

It struck me also that Liam would get over it more easily if there was a way of proving what had really happened.

Coffee consumed, I made a suggestion. “Look, let’s go and see Helen Mackie and see if we can get you re-instated. Maybe she’ll have calmed down a bit and will listen to what you have to say.”

“There’s no point. There’s no way she’ll take me back. And anyway, after what’s happened, I don’t think I could go back. All I want to do is find that little bastard and knock the truth out of him.”

I looked at him sorrowfully. This was one rather washed out, worried kid with a hangover and I wanted to help him as much as I could.

“Well, I’d like to go and speak to her anyway. Even if it is only to apologise to her for what’s happened. After all it was me that got you the job in the first place. We’ll go up to the residence and you can pack up your stuff. Have you got much? Will it go in the Mercedes? We’ll bring it up here for the moment.”

“I’ve not got too much but we might have to make two trips.”

“OK. We’ll do that. It’ll not take long and save us hiring a van.”

I explained to Heather where we were going and why and we got in the car and headed in towards Bridge of Allan. A thought occurred to me as we were on the road.

“Liam, are you sure that this guy, Will, doesn’t know where your Rémy has gone?”

“Well I didn’t interrogate him very deeply but he said he didn’t.”

“Why don’t you go back and see him again while I go and see Helen Mackie? See if he can give us any clue as to where he was going?”

I was angry at what had seemingly been done to Liam. And I didn’t like the fact that it looked as if Helen Mackie had been screwed out of millions of dollars by some bloody great multi-national pharmaceutical company with absolutely no moral conscience whatsoever. Mind you, where do you find a moral conscience in business? – but I won’t go into my thoughts on that.

And then I had remembered where I had heard of LyonPharma before….

The grass in front of us stretched down towards the lake. A gentle slope of some fifty yards, until it seemed to merge into the quiet grey waters which reflected a silvery sheen from the lowering sun. It was about four kilometers wide at this point and we could easily see the town of Versoix on the other side and, behind it, rising into the distance, the rugged skyline of the Jura Mountains.

At this time of year, July, the weather stayed warm well into the evening. In a couple of hours the sun would disappear behind the peaks. The water was busy with sailing boats of various shapes, sizes and colours heading back to their ports – Corsier, Geneva, Coppet and the many other small harbours that were scattered along both shores of Lake Geneva. Pierre and I sat contentedly, sipping the champagne which he had opened in honour of my sixty-seventh birthday.